I would not be surprised that a general ready who might be very knowledgeable about science, religion, and psychology, after pursuing a good discussion of psychic research could be left with the question, “Why wasn’t I ever exposed to this?” In The Conscious Universe(1997) Radin provides an excellent discussion as to why parapsychology or psychical research has encountered difficulties in making its findings known outside its own dedicated group.
Two main dynamics are at play. For many people the term parapsychology brings to mind an array of supposed unexplained, strange, and often spooky phenomena. Movies and television capitalize on our fascination with the paranormal to feature science fiction type stories in which dramatic and often threatening things occur. Sometimes quite credulous investigators or ghost buster types go around looking into these things. Although the phenomena often featured are quite dramatic, they do resemble in some ways unexplained things that actually happen in people’s lives. Thus, many people may take these fictional stories as more or less real and are ready to believe in the existence of strange things that have little reality. The credulous true believers thus pose one type of threat to serious work in parapsychology. Supposed well informed commentators through various media are quick to tell us tell us we should hesitant to take such beliefs at face value.
Their hesitancy is supported by the other major impediment for psi researchers, the extreme skeptics. Because of many people’s gullibility a small number of very vocal skeptics have appeared alarmed that the general public is being misled into accepting what they view as essentially nonsense. They see as the culprits those researchers whose investigations have produced findings supportive of the reality of psi. It’s interesting in this regard that these skeptics don’t vocally attack those scientists working in such fields as robotics because of fictionalized accounts of intelligent machines taking over the world or mainstream religion for things going on in such television programs as “Touched by an Angel” or “Charmed,” which would also seem to be encouraging a belief in “nonsense.”
The general public just doesn’t typically get exposed to serious work in parapsychology. Instead, even those television programs that do present real paranormal phenomena such as people relating their near-death experiences often have a panel of experts which inevitably includes a vocal skeptic who can explain why the phenomena are not real and argue that those so-called experts who believe otherwise are naïve. The implication clearly is that the skeptic represents the voice of reason with whom the show’s producers want to be associated. They wouldn’t want to alienate him and have him contact their large corporate sponsors.
The common stereotypes about psi research that get generated in this and many other ways, Radin emphasizes, are “overly simplistic at best and, in many cases, just plain wrong” As an example he quotes philosopher Paul Churchland who in his 1984 book,” Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind” made this statement:
“Despite the endless pronouncements and anecdotes in the popular press, and despite ‘a steady trickle of serious research on such things, there is no significant or trustworthy evidence that such phenomena even exist. The wide gap between popular conviction on this matter, and the actual evidence, is something that itself calls for research. For there is not a single parapsychological effect that can be repeatedly or reliably produced in any laboratory suitably equipped to perform and control the experiment. Not one.”
Radin points out, this is just plain wrong. As he says, and as we have seen, a number of psi effects revealed in scientific studies have been replicated dozens to hundreds of times in laboratories around the world.
A few of those individuals Radin labels as extreme skeptics are more than merely annoying and publicly label parapsychology as a pseudoscience which implies fraud or incompetence on the part of the researchers. This has been instrumental in preventing psi research to be done at all. He quotes skeptical British psychologist David Marks who in a commentary in the prominent journal Nature, March 1986, wrote:
Parascience has all the qualities of a magical system while wearing the mantle of Science. Until any significant discoveries are made, science can justifiably ignore it, but it is important to say why: parascience is a pseudo-scientific system of untested beliefs steeped in illusion, error and fraud.
These opinions published in influential journals, Radin asserts, have made many funding agencies reluctant to sponsor parapsychological studies because they fear being associated with what conventional wisdom has declared a “pseudo science.”
Radin points out that the same kind of vigorous debating that occurs in the other branches of science also occurs in the professional society of scientists and scholars interested in psi phenomena, the Parapsychological Association. However, the extreme critics that manage to make their voices heard don’t come from that organization. In fact, the vast majority of this small group of armchair quarterbacks have not contributed any original research related to the field. They appear to operate from the assumption that, if psi cannot exist, then why should they bother to spend the time and money to study it? They “use every rhetorical trick in the book” to convince us that they are correct, and that any evidence to the contrary is somehow flawed.
Radin quotes the well-known skeptic Martin Gardner who wrote in his 1983 book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener:
“How can the public know that for fifty years skeptical psychologists have been trying their best to replicate classic psi experiments, and with notable unsuccess [sic]? It is this fact more than any other that has led to parapsychology’s perpetual stagnation. Positive evidence keeps coming from a tiny group of enthusiasts, while negative evidence keeps coming from a much larger group of skeptics”
This is a complete fiction. In fact, there is no large group of skeptics, and they don’t generate research evidence.
The struggles of parapsychology for recognition also relates, Radin says, to a heavily distorted portrayal of these studies in the media and in college textbooks. He describes the 1985 work of psychologist Irvin Child, then at Yale University, who reviewed several academic books about psi research including those authored by British psychologist Mark Hansel, York University psychologist James Alcock, and psychologists Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones. Child discovered the authors made one flawed description after another of the research they described leading to his conclusion that these books contained “nearly incredible falsification of the facts about the experiments.” (p. 223)
Perhaps even more disturbing is the treatment of psi research in college introductory psychology textbooks because they contain all the detail that most students will ever know about the field. Radin refers to the effort of psychologist Miguel Roig and his colleagues who in 1991 published a detailed analysis of the treatment of parapsychology in introductory psychology textbooks .
Of the 64 textbooks they surveyed published between 1980 and 1989, 43 included some mention of parapsychology. One-third didn’t even mention the topic, although college students find it fascinating. Much of the coverage, the reviewers noted, reflected a lack of familiarity with the field of parapsychology and displayed an unacceptable reliance on secondary sources, most of which were written by nonparapsychologist critics. Reflecting these sources, 35 of the 43 mentioned lack of replication as the most serious problem with poor experimental designs and fraud being the 2nd and 3rd most serious problems with the research. The textbooks typically concluded with a wait-and-see stance toward psychic phenomena. Surveys of 1990s and 2002 textbooks found this same poor and biased coverage.
As a check on introductory psychology texts, I examined the book being used at Whittenberg University in 2014 “” Psychology: Science of Mind and Behavior” by Michael Passer and Ronald Smith. A two page insert in color poses the question, “ESP myth or reality, and asks, do you believe?” Their assessment is that “when tested under controlled conditions in well-designed experiments and replications, claim after claim of psychic ability has evaporated.”
In their conclusion Passer and Smith refer to comments by James Alcock, the same author previously mentioned whose book on parapsychology Child characterized as containing “nearly incredible falsification of the facts about the experiments.”